Tina Turner 1939–

“We never do anything nice and easy,” intones Tina Turner in the spoken introduction to her famed rendition of the rock classic “Proud Mary,” recorded with her then-husband Ike. “We always do it nice…and rough.” Tina’s life as a hard-working soul singer was often rough and anything but nice; she endured endless touring and—according to her own allegations and those of many others—abuse and exploitation from Ike Turner, who discovered her. She sang with his revue for years and racked up hits like “Proud Mary” and “Nutbush City Limits” before finally leaving him in the mid-1970s, casting about and starting virtually from scratch before returning to prominence in 1984 with a number one hit.

Since then, Turner has remained in the public eye, becoming, in the words of Vanity Fair’s Maureen Orth, “the queen mother of rock ‘n’ roll.” A1992 film version of her life story—based on her 1986 autobiography—was a surprise hit, and even when well into her fifties, she continued drawing large crowds to her concerts. As much as her gritty, rafter-shaking voice, Turner’s strength in the face of adversity has made her a legend. “I was a victim; I don’t dwell on it,” she told Orth, adding, “I stood up for my life.”

“Tina” was an invention of Ike’s; the singer was born Anna Mae Bullock in rural Tennessee in 1939. Her father, Floyd Richard Bullock, was a farm overseer and church deacon who fought perpetually with his “black Indian” wife, Zelma. According to the singer’s recollection in her autobiography I, Tina, the family grew its own food, buying only “flour and sugar from the country store in Nutbush.” The town, in and around which she spent her childhood, was tiny and sparsely populated. At various points, young Anna and her sister were raised by their grandmothers, since their parents moved about, changed jobs, quarrelled, and finally split up. Zelma ran off to St. Louis when Anna was eleven, and Floyd stayed only a year longer. Anna found herself in the care of other relatives and cousins over the years. She began working for a friendly white family, the Hendersons, in nearby Ripley, and remembered years later fashioning her dreams of a stable home on their lives.

Singer and film actress. Sang with Ike Turner’s Kings of Rhythm and the Ike and Tina Turner Revue, 1956-76; solo performer 1976—. Hit recordings include “A Fool in Love,”“Proud Mary,”“Nutbush City Limits” and “What’s Love Got to Do With It.” Appeared in films Tommy, 1975, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, 1985, and What’s Love Got to Do With It, 1993. Participated in relief concert Live Aid, 1984, and charity recording “We Are the World,” 1985. Author of autobiography I Tina.

Selected awards: Grammy Awards for best rhythm and blues vocal performance by a group (with Ike Turner) for “Proud Mary,” 1971; best female pop vocal performance and record of the year for “What’s Love Got to Do With It,” 1984; and best female rock performance for “Better Be Good to Me,” 1984, “One of the Living,” 1985, “Back Where You Started,” 1986, and Tina Live in Europe, 1988. American Music Awards for best female vocalist and best video performer, 1984; inducted (with Ike Turner) into Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame, 1991; Essence award, 1993.

last thing I do, I’m gonna have long hair and some big hips and big legs.” Years later, as Tina Turner, her hair and legs would be her defining features.

In the 1950s, she moved to St. Louis to be with her mother, and it was there that she met the man—and heard the music—that would dominate her future. Ike Turner’s Kings of Rhythm were local stars, enthralling club audiences with their energetic R&B in the early ‘50s, the germinating years of rock and roll; their 1951 single “Rocket 88” was a number one R&B hit and has been called the first rock and roll record. Ike, the bandleader and guitarist, had an evil reputation and myriad girlfriends. Anna, who had always loved singing hymns in church, used to sing along from the audience; “I wanted to get up there so bad,” she remembered in her autobiography.

Anna’s sister Alline was dating Ike’s drummer Gene Washington, who heard Anna sing and eventually arranged to suspend a microphone off the stage so the audience could hear her. He compared her voice to that of blues legend Bessie Smith, noting, “A woman doing that type of thing then was kind of a no-no“; in other words earthy and sexy in a way that was guaranteed to thrill Ike’s audience.

Although it took her a considerable length of time to get Ike’s attention (since she was too thin to arouse his otherwise voracious carnal appetite), she did finally get him to hear her. Belting out the B.B. King tune “You Know I Love You” when Ike played it on the organ during an intermission, she made a distinct impression, as she recollected to co-author Kurt Loder: “Boy, Ike—that blew him away. He went ‘Giirrrlll!’ And he stopped playing the organ and he ran down off that stage and he picked me right up! He said, ‘I didn’t know you could really sing. What else do you know?’” Soon she was performing regularly with the band but concealing her new activity from her mother, who predictably forbade it when she found out. Ike, however, made a special visit to Zelma and turned on his considerable charm, winning her approval and securing Anna a regular gig. Singing gutsy R&B cover tunes with Ike and the band made her “feel like a star.”

Life on the R&B club scene—the so-called “chitlin circuit“—was hardly safe, Ike’s assurances to Zelma notwithstanding. Soon Anna became pregnant by Ike’s saxophone player and bore her first son, Raymond Craig, in 1958. She took a job in a hospital to supplement her musical income, which was soon raised from $15 to $25 a week. She then moved into Ike’s house, though she compared their initial relationship to that of siblings. Later, however, he began “moving in” on her life and would eventually exercise almost complete control over her.

In the meantime, however, she sang on Ike’s single “Box Top.” It wasn’t until the single “A Fool in Love,” however, that she would see chart success; the record scored on the R&B and pop charts, after being released under the name “Ike and Tina Turner.” The name “Tina” appealed to Ike because it rhymed with “Sheena,” the jungle queen from a 1940s movie serial; it became Anna Mae’s new moniker.
The surname accompanied a quickie marriage in Tijuana, Mexico, in 1962. “I was now Mrs. Ike Turner,” Tina remarked of the event. “Or whatever.” The group, over the objections of some of its members, became the Ike and Tina Turner Revue.

Tina, as she was now known, was soon pregnant by Ike. Though she felt gratitude and loyalty toward her mentor and husband—who was technically a bigamist, since he had married another woman previously and didn’t obtain a divorce for many years—she acknowledged in her memoir that he “kept control of me with fear.” He worked her relentlessly, forcing her to tour even when she was hospitalized with jaundice, and beat her when he perceived (or suspected) insolence. Meanwhile, he carried on with various “Ikettes“—Tina’s backup singer/dancers—and many other women. The Revue, however, was hot, riding the success of “A Fool in Love” to prestige gigs at New York’s Apollo Theater, venues in Las Vegas, and a spot on television’s American Bandstand. The group had a string of R&B hits, some of which also made the pop charts.

Ike renewed his record contract and bought a large house in Los Angeles; his and Tina’s children were brought there from St. Louis. The Revue kept touring under increasingly stressful conditions, even as Ike’s shrewd business sense earned him ever larger sums. The Ikettes left, partly in response to his treatment of Tina. Later, Ike and Tina signed up with Loma Records, a Warner Bros. R&B subsidiary headed by Bob Krasnow. The Revue appeared in a pop festival that was later released as a concert film, The Big TNT Show. They also toured with English rock sensations the Rolling Stones, instantly winning favor with the British band, who worshipped the gritty, soulful sound of black American music and were electrified by Tina’s performance.

Krasnow received a call from legendary pop producer Phil Spector, who wanted Tina to sing on a record—without Ike. The normally autocratic husband agreed to the arrangement thanks to a generous financial offer, although Spector stipulated that Ike stay out of the studio. He then went to work on a lavish production of the song “River Deep, Mountain High,” a barnstorming soul number that took his patented “wall of sound” approach to new heights. At his request, Tina refrained from the high-pitched wailing and “chitlin circuit” theatrics Ike had always demanded, in favor of a controlled delivery that stuck closer to the written melody. Released late in 1966 with a tremendous advance hype, the song flopped in the U.S.—perhaps due to botched promotion—but was a hit in the United Kingdom. It has, in retrospect, reached the status of a classic.

England, Tina explained, was “the beginning of my escape from Ike Turner“—an escape that wouldn’t be realized physically for more than a decade. But the country’s rock musicians tended to adore Tina, and this adoration somewhat cushioned the impact of Ike’s blows, which rained down upon her resilient flesh with ever greater frequency and fury as he descended into “blow” himself: cocaine. The Revue and Ike’s virtual harem began to appear to Tina as, in her words, a “sadistic little cult“; eventually she tried to run away from him, but he tracked her down. Tina even attempted suicide by taking fifty Valium tablets; though the hospital pumped her stomach, she didn’t revive until Ike spoke to her, seemingly brushing aside death in his allencompassing claim on the woman he’d discovered, managed, married, and monopolized.

Ike and Tina scored another big hit with Otis Redding’s “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” in 1969, but Tina was by this time less interested in R&B than in rock. And it would be rock songs, for the most part written by young white artists, that would provide her biggest hits. In 1970 the Revue scored with their versions of the Beatles’“Come Together” and “I Want to Take You Higher” by funk-rocker Sly Stone; the following year saw their greatest hit, a jumping rock-and-soul rendition of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Proud Mary.” It sold over a million copies. The Revue again toured with the Rolling Stones. They failed to score any more huge hits until “Nutbush City Limits,” penned by Tina, stormed up the U.S. and U.K. charts in 1973.

Tina had been introduced to Buddhism by a friend, and her chanting helped her survive Ike’s increasing abuse and cocaine dependency. In 1975 she starred in her first film, portraying the Acid Queen in Ken Russell’s production of the Who’s rock opera Tommy. Tina was befriended by co-star Ann-Margret, a longtime fan, and appeared on the star’s London television special. She also released a solo collection of country songs, but it didn’t fare well commercially. Ike and Tina had their last hit together in 1975, “Baby—Get It On,” and that year saw the release of Tommy, which garnered Tina rave reviews. Eventually, she vowed to leave Ike—buoyed by predictions of psychics
that she would become a big star without him—and fought back against a beating while the band was on tour in Texas in 1976. She then fled with only thirty-six cents and a gas station credit card to her name. Ike pursued her but seemed to realize she was determined to stay away from him. He continued to harass her, however, from a distance, and his threats led her to surrender almost every claim for monetary recompense during their divorce proceedings. “My life’s more important,” she declared, leaving Ike with the lion’s share of their community holdings and shouldering the debt for the shows cancelled after she left him.

Tina worked cleaning friends’ houses and even living on food stamps while she began putting her life together. Nonetheless, she savored her freedom. Caring for their children for a while, she eventually sent them off: “I had been their mother, I had been his wife. Now it was time to be me.” Her 1978 album Rough sank, but she supported herself with cabaret-like shows in Las Vegas and at similar venues. Even so, she remained massively in debt for the cancelled performances from the last Ike and Tina tour. Through Ann-Margret she hooked up with Australian manager Roger Davies, who had relocated to the States. He, in turn, revamped her showbiz act, replacing the tuxedoed dancers and elaborate costumes for a stripped-down rock band. She toured Europe in 1980-81, and Davies finally helped her stage the beginning of her U.S. comeback with a well-publicized performance at New York’s The Ritz, where Tina Turner brought down the house. A number of celebrities turned up, including members of the Rolling Stones.

Shortly thereafter, Tina joined Rod Stewart in a rendition of his “Hot Legs” on television’s Saturday Night Live; the Stones then invited her to tour with them. Her new-wave version of the Temptations’ classic “Ball of Confusion,” recorded in England with the synthesizer duo Ware and Marsh, appeared on a collection with other star readings and charted well there but wasn’t released in America.

Davies, meanwhile, managed to get Tina a deal with Capitol Records, but only for the European market. Her next single with Ware and Marsh, a remake of soul legend Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together,” was a smash hit in the U.K., and only when imports and dance clubs established its potential in the U.S. did Capitol agree to release it stateside. The company then insisted that Turner cancel her scheduled tour and record an album. Davies insisted that it be recorded in England in tandem with the tour. While she performed, he gathered material for her, and the result, 1984’s Private Dancer, would return her to the top in her own country. With hits like “What’s Love Got to Do With It,”“Better Be Good to Me” and the title song by Dire Straits leader Mark Knopfler, the album shot to number one. Soon she graced the cover of Rolling Stone magazine, took home two American Music Awards, and won two Grammys. In Loder’s words, “After a quarter of a century, Tina Turner was an overnight sensation.”

After appearing at the gigantic 1984 Live Aid benefit concert, Turner acted in George Miller’s 1985 film Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, scoring another hit with the song “We Don’t Need Another Hero” from the film’s soundtrack. In 1986 she published, I Tina, which wasn’t a blockbuster, but told her fans the intimate details of her personal struggles. She sang on the all-star charity recording “We Are the World,” won a Grammy for her performance in the “Prince’s Trust All-Star Rock Concert” and scored a number of hit singles and albums in the ensuing years. In 1991 she and Ike were inducted into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame.

The year 1993 saw the release of the Touchstone Pictures film version of Tina’s life, What’s Love Got to Do With It, starring Angela Bassett as Tina and Laurence Fishbume as Ike. It was a smash; Tina re-recorded several hits for the soundtrack and even appeared at the film’s end as herself. In the wake of the film’s success, she went on tour again. Variety remarked in a review of a 1993 concert that “watching Tina Turner perform is like watching a tornado traverse the landscape as it builds in power and intensity.” The Los Angeles Times called her show “more effective as a sweeping piece of theater than as a concert,” but admired her “energy and heart.” She had reached the pinnacle of her profession, and found love with a younger man, German record executive Erwin Bach. She publicly refused Ike’s request to open for her on tour, declaring, in a Time interview, “He must live his own life now. And I must live mine.” And for a Newsweek feature about older rockers who continue to “Light Our Fire,” it was Tina who graced the cover.

Turner, Tina

Contemporary Musicians
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale, a part of Cengage Learning

Tina Turner

Singer

Tina Turner exploded onto the rhythm & blues charts as a lead singer in 1960. As a solo artist, she had proved herself a diehard singer of rock and roll. By 2000 her credits included 27 top ten songs and more than 180 million records sold worldwide. Her life with Ike Turner was the subject of the biographical film What's Love Got to Do with It in 1993. Twenty years after the release of her 1960s recording of "River Deep, Mountain High" with the Ike & Tina Turner Review, the song appeared among the top 20 recordings in Rolling Stone's top 100 hits of all time. Youthful, ageless, and a wellspring of energy, even as the diva turned 60 years old, she continued to entertain eager audiences, leaving her legions of fans to marvel at the music that continued even after her retirement from touring in 2000.

Turner was born Anna Mae Bullock on November 26, 1939, in Brownsville, Tennessee. She grew up in Nutbush, Tennessee, not far from Brownsville, where she lived with her sharecropping family in a two-room house. Turner recalled in her 1986 autobiography, I, Tina, that neither she nor her family wanted for anything, thanks to a lush garden and plenty of chickens and cows, as well as game in the surrounding area. "Were we poor? I don't remember being poor. My father was always the top man on the farm: all the sharecroppers answered to him, and he answered to the owner," she recalled. "We always had nice furniture in our house, and Alline and I always had our own separate bedroom. And we had animals—the cows and pigs and chickens and horses—and I knew people who didn't."

Young Anna Mae spent much of her childhood with various relatives, starting with her paternal grandparents. She moved in with the farm overseer's family when her parents moved to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in search of government jobs promised by the United States during World War II. When her sister Alline graduated from high school and moved to Detroit, Anna Mae moved in with her maternal grandmother. When her grandmother died in 1956 she went to live with her mother and Alline in St. Louis, Missouri.

Her musical talent emerged when she was still a youngster, but it was during her teen years in St. Louis in the mid-1950s that she made her historic liaison with band leader Ike Turner, whom she married in 1960. The collaboration began at the Club Manhattan in East St. Louis, Kansas. Initially Tina Turner performed under the stage name of "Little Anna," until the band's first hit single, "A Fool in Love," scurried up the Rhythm & Blues charts in 1960, with Tina Turner as lead singer. The success of that record led Ike Turner to reinvent his band in order to spotlight Tina Turner. Thereafter the group performed as the Ike & Tina Turner Review. They embarked on a national tour, and a succession of recordings followed, including several hit singles. During the 1960s the Turners worked as an opening act for the Rolling Stones, and Tina released a crossover hit
called "River Deep, Mountain High," recorded by the legendary Phil Spector, that moved her into the fore-front of popular music.

"'River Deep, Mountain High' was indeed a Spector masterpiece," wrote co-author Kurt Loder in the book I, Tina. "The sound was so preternaturally deep and lustrous that one felt almost in danger of falling into it. With the enormous studio orchestra pounding away at the rumbling riffs, a soaring string section, and what sounded like a battalion of backup singers doot-do-dooting away, Tina gave the performance of her life. While some of Spector's early work has dated over the years, 'River Deep,' two decades later, can still take the top of your head off."

Sadly, the record was not a success. Spector went into seclusion. Some attributed the failure of the single to the fact that Spector had had 26 consecutive hits on the charts prior to this, and the industry was tiring of his successes. "River Deep, Mountain High" only reached the number 88 spot on domestic charts, but fared much better on the British charts, where it reached number three and then stayed on the charts for another 13 weeks. "That record just never found a home," said Turner in her autobiography. "It was too black for the pop stations, and too pop for the black stations. Nobody gave it a chance. But I still felt real good about that record, felt it was something I could be proud of. … 'River Deep' showed people what I had in me."

Tina Turner's Let Me Touch Your Mind, released in 1972 during the Ike & Tina Turner Review days, was her first solo album. In 1973 she released a second album, called The Country of Tina Turner. The Turners' performances, enhanced with high-energy backup singers called the Ikettes, brought them to the forefront of rock and roll between 1958 and 1978. "Proud Mary," the Turners' frenzied arrangement of a popular classic, became a trademark theme, with music erupting from a slow and soothing introduction into an unbridled melee of rhythm. "Proud Mary" peaked at number four on the record charts, and in 1971 the duo won a Grammy Award for Best R&B Vocal for their interpretation of the rhythmic, pile-driving ballad.

Abuse Took a Toll

One fact that had remained hidden to the public during the Turners' years of stardom was the presence of severe domestic violence that plagued their marriage. Tina Turner, who suffered intense physical and emotional abuse at the hands of her husband, reached her limit in June of 1976. She endured a severe beating shortly after the couple arrived in Dallas for their first stop on a national tour. In desperation, she abandoned Ike Turner, although the tour was a major one for their careers. She left with less than 50 cents in her pocket and spared no time to collect her baggage. One month later, on July 27, 1976, Tina Turner filed for divorce, and emerged with a small fortune from the settlement once the divorce was finalized in March of 1978. The money paid off lawsuits from canceled Ike & Tina Turner Review engagements. Tuner gave the rest away, leaving her virtually penniless. But she forged ahead, intent on creating a solo career of her own.

On Her Own

In 1977 Turner moved to London, England, and spent the remainder of that decade living and working in
Europe. Undeterred by the poor showing of her 1978 solo album Rough (on United Artists), Turner hired manager Roger Davies in 1979. She returned to the United States in 1981, toured with the Rolling Stones, and renewed her efforts to revitalize her career. She met with success in 1984 when her album Private Dancer spun off three top ten singles, including "What's Love Got to Do with It." The song became her first number one hit record, and she won three Grammys that year, including Best Female Pop Vocalist, Best Female Rock Vocalist, and Record of the Year. She was lauded for her sensational comeback, and in 1985 she scored with a number two hit, "We Don't Need Another Hero," from the movie Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. Additionally, her recording of "One of the Living" won a Grammy Award for Best Rock Vocal Performance by a Female.

Yet as she conquered the issues of her tempestuous marriage to Ike Turner, she quickly tired of explaining to the press and public about the years she had spent under his Svengali spell. In an attempt to bring closure to the affair, she immersed herself in documenting the painful details of her former marriage in an autobiography, I, Tina. The book, co-written with rock journalist Kurt Loder, appeared in 1986. That same year her Break Every Rule album went multi-platinum, and she added another Grammy to her collection, for "Back Where You Started." In 1987 Turner took to the road for 18 months for a world tour of 25 countries that lasted into 1988. She performed 220 concerts during that promotion, including a phenomenal program in Brazil where she appeared before an audience of 182,000, one of the largest concert audiences ever assembled. Turner's concert tours sold out repeatedly, her recordings registered brisk sales, and her Capitol Records release Tina Live in Europe won a Grammy for Best Rock Vocal Performance by a Female.

By this time Turner's image had grown to legendary proportions. She took some time to rest after the well-received tour, and in 1989 returned to Europe, where she bought a home in London at Notting Hill Gate and settled there. Her 1989 release Foreign Affair, largely self-produced, was her first album after a year's hiatus.

At the Movies

Turner performed in select motion pictures, although acting was never the focus of her career. In 1975 she appeared as the Acid Queen in the film version of the The Who's rock opera Tommy, and in 1985 she portrayed the character of Auntie Entity in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. Her preference was to appear in roles of women who emote strength.

In 1993 a British video appeared, called Tina Turner: The Girl from Nutbush, a documentary including rare footage from the early years of the Ike and Tina Turner Review. The low-visibility project was upstaged, however, when film director Brian Gibson transformed Turner's 1986 autobiography into a feature film. Kate Lanier wrote the screenplay for the movie, which starred Angela Bassett and Laurence Fishburne, and Turner generously provided creative consultation for the project. In related interviews after the movie opened in theaters, Turner expressed her desire to let go of the memories portrayed in the film; Ike Turner avoided endorsement of the final product.

In 1996 the indefatigable Turner released Wildest Dreams, featuring Bono, Sheryl Crow, Sting, and Antonio Banderas, among others. Turner, nearly 60 years old by then, seemed a human dynamo. On her tenth solo album, Twenty Four Seven, released by Virgin Records in January of 2000, she collaborated with several younger artists. It was her first album since 1996, and critics applauded the effort. The Los Angeles Times said of Turner that she "successfully meshes retro-soul with techno flava … [and] is still up to any challenge." In conjunction with the release of her album in 2000, she performed in the pre-game show of Super Bowl XXXIV, and then embarked on an international tour, beginning in South Africa and encompassing 49 cities, with a grand finale at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. Turner then announced her plans to retire from touring at the end of the 2000 tour, which would include 116 concerts. Jon Pareles of the New York Times noted that "Ms. Turner is not about to become a grande dame anytime soon, reflecting from a distance on past triumphs and heartbreak. The way she sings, she's still a fierce contender in the battle of the sexes." The tour was the top-grossing concert tour of 2000 with $80.2 million in ticket sales.

Turner was repeatedly asked why she would choose to retire while fans are still in thrall. "I'm still in good shape, I still have the energy, but when you work at a job for so long, you start to feel the need to make a change," Turner told People. "I'm rock and roll, and I'm a woman. … and at a certain age you stop looking the part." She still had plans to continue recording and make occasional live appearances.

Private Life of "Private Dancer"

It is a surprise to Turner's fans that her on-stage gyrations and shouting match singing style are solely a performance illusion. In person she is slight and calm, not at all like her stage and musical persona. Writers Hedda Maye and Robyn Foyster of Ebony called her "the epitome of classic chic with a classic sense of style." After moving to London in 1977 following her breakup with Ike Turner, she moved on to Cologne, Germany, and then to Zurich, Switzerland, in 1998, where she owned a luxury home shared with Erwin Bach, a German record company executive with whom she had begun a relationship in 1986. Turner has repeatedly said she and Bach do not ever plan to marry. "We're like an old wedded couple anyway, so we really don't see the need," she said in an interview with
United Press International. She also spends time in a custom mansion in Cap Ferrat, France, called Anna Fleur. "It offers me security," she told Swiss News, of living in Europe. "It is a place where I have found more success, more appreciation!"

She is the mother of two sons, Craig and Ron, and is also a grandmother and great-grandmother. Shortly before she left Ike Turner, she became a student of Buddhism and continues to practice that religion devotedly. Turner is reportedly a homebody who enjoys decorating her homes and eating Bach's home-cooked meals.

Even in retirement, Turner has continued to triumph on the charts. A 2005 greatest-hits compilation, All the Best, debuted on the charts in the number two position. The collection included three new songs, one of which resulted in a new hit for the diva within four weeks of its release, when "Open Arms" made it atop the Adult Contemporary radio charts. "All the Best could usher in another stage in Turner's long career," wrote Fred Bronson in Billboard. "One thing is certain: The debut of 'Best' expands Turner's overall chart span to 44 years, five months and three weeks." But who's counting?

Tina Turner

Encyclopedia of World Biography
COPYRIGHT 2004 The Gale Group Inc.

Tina Turner

Well-known for her trademark legs, throaty voice, and boundless stage energy, Tina Turner (born Anna Mae Bullock, 1939) was one of the sexiest and most popular international performers of the 20th century. She first began singing with the Kings of Rhythm, and then formed the Ike and Tina Turner Revue with the leader of that group. Leaving her abusive partner in 1976, she went on to star in her own right into the mid 1980s.

"T ina" was an invention of Ike Turner. The singer was born Anna Mae Bullock in 1939 in rural Tennessee. Her father, Floyd Bullock, was a farm overseer and church deacon who fought perpetually with his "black Indian" wife Zelma. Turner and her older sister, Alline, spent most of their childhood shuttling between the homes of grandparents, father, mother, and a cousin.

Yearned to Sing

For a time during World War II, when Turner's parents were still married, they moved without their children to Knoxville where work was plentiful in the defense industry. The girls were allowed one visit in two years, and it was on this visit that Turner first sang for money. It was in a ladies' dress shop; the saleswomen gave her quarters. She also experienced her first lively, soulful church visit in the Sanctified Church, where self-expression was encouraged, unlike the constrained atmosphere of her grandparents' Baptist church back home.

In 1956 Zelma Bullock was divorced and living in St. Louis when she ended a long separation from her daughters. Zelma brought them to live with her after her own mother, with whom Turner had been living in Tennessee, died. Reunited with the older sister she idolized, Turner began to
experience an awakening to the rhythm and blues of East St. Louis, where the Kings of Rhythm were a hot band holding court at Club Manhattan. Ike Turner led the band, and Alline Bullock was dating the drummer. Younger Anna Bullock watched and waited for weeks for a chance to get on stage with the band, and when she finally did, she sang a B.B. King song and impressed Ike Turner so immediately and overwhelmingly that he asked her to perform regularly with them. He gave her the stage name of Little Ann.

The reputation of Ike Turner mirrored the violence of his childhood, during which his father, a Baptist minister, was murdered by the boyfriend of the minister's lover. Ike Turner and Anna Bullock began their relationship as mentor and protégé. Her romantic involvement at the time centered around Raymond Hill, the band's saxophone player and the father of Anna Bullock's first child, born in 1958. Although Ike still lived with his second wife, Anna moved into their home, and soon after that Ike and Anna had a son named Ricky. They married in Mexico, although it was later discovered that Ike had never divorced his previous wife.

Ike and Tina Turner on the Road

In spite of constant personal strains on their relationship, the Turners continued to make music. In late 1959 Anna Mae Bullock filled in for a last-minute no-show singer during a recording session with the Kings of Rhythm. The result was a smash hit in the summer of 1960 called "A Fool in Love" and was released under the names Ike and Tina Turner.

What became the Ike and Tina Turner Revue was a slick package of Ike Turner's shrewd management and song writing, Tina Turner's intensely energetic and sensual lead voice and body, three backup "Ikettes, " and an eight piece band. They traveled the country, their sound a combination of country blues, ghetto rhythm, and gospel passion, and by 1969 they had released 15 albums and 60 singles, including the hit songs "It's Gonna Work Out Fine, " "I Pity the Fool, " "I Idolize You, " "Poor Fool, " and "Tra La La La La."

"River Deep"

Stardom for the Ike and Tina Turner Revue came about first in Europe. Legendary pop producer Phil Spector wanted Tina to sing on a record without Ike. The normally autocratic husband agreed to the arrangement thanks to a generous financial offer. Released late in 1966 the song" River Deep, Mountain High" topped the British pop charts for many weeks in 1966.

Ike and Tina Turned toured Europe twice in the 1960s with the Rolling Stones. Tina had taught Mick Jagger, the leader of that group, how to dance on stage. By the time the revue returned to the United States, Ike and Tina Turner had "crossed over" more than the Atlantic. They were wildly popular with mainstream audiences who were stunned by the forceful blend of hard rock and roll and provocative soul. Tina Turner aptly describes their style in her introduction to "Proud Mary" when she says, "we never do anything nice and easy, we always do it nice—and rough." That song won a Grammy Award in 1971 for best rhythm and blues vocal by a group. Albums released by the revue in the 1970s include Working Together (1970), Blues Roots (1972), Nutbush City Limits (1973), and The Gospel According to Ike and Tina (1974).

Although Tina Turner continued to tour and record with the group during the early 1970s, her own identity began to emerge both personally and professionally. She released three solo albums and appeared in the rock opera film Tommy as the "Acid Queen." Years of physical and emotional abuse by Ike Turner became too much for her, and she walked out on him and the group during a concert tour stop in Texas in July 1976. Fleeing with only thirty-six cents and a gas station credit card, Turner worked cleaning friends' houses and even living on food stamps while she began putting her life together.

Nonetheless, Tina Turner savored her freedom. Caring for her children for a while, she eventually sent them off: "I had been their mother, I had been his wife. Now it was time to be me. A solo album called Rough, released in 1978, received little attention from the press and even less from listeners. She continued to tour, however, mostly in Europe and in small American clubs and hotels.

Tina's Comeback

Once again, the Rolling Stones provided a ticket for her success, and her special guest performances on their 1981 sold-out U.S. tour introduced Tina Turner to a new generation of listeners fascinated with her wild, sensual, visceral presence. One music critic, after seeing her in concert, described her as she entered the stage "in mid-scream with both legs pumping, hips grinding, long mane whirling, her mouth wrapped around some of the sexiest sounds ever set to music."

After touring with Lionel Ritchie and Rod Stewart and doing her own record-breaking European tour, Tina Turner's 1984 album Private Dancer sold more than 11 million copies worldwide and earned four Grammy Awards, including Record of the Year for "What's Love Got To Do with It."

Another hit album was released in 1986 called Break Every Rule. In 1985, Turner appeared in the film Mad Max: Beyond the Thunderdome, from which came the hit song "We Don't Need Another Hero." She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in January 1991, and her "Foreign Affairs" tour later that year sold out in 19 countries, drawing over three million fans.

Movie Bio and Album a Hit

In her 1986 best-selling autobiography, I, Tina, written with Kurt Loder, she describes how she endured the persecution and torment of Ike Turner, while at the same time laying the foundation for a wildly successful and popular music career. In 1993, Touchstone Pictures released a film version of the book called What's Love Got To Do with It, starring Angela Bassett as Tina and Laurence Fishburne as Ike. The movie was a box-office success. Turner re-recorded several hits for the soundtrack and even appeared at the film's end as herself. In the wake of the film's success, Turner went on tour again. Variety remarked in a review of a 1993 concert that "watching Tina Turner perform is like watching a tornado traverse the landscape as it builds in power and intensity." The Los Angeles Times reviewer called her show "more effective as a sweeping piece of theater than as a concert, " but he admired her "energy and heart."

In 1996, to promote her album Wildest Dreams, Turner went on a hectic yearlong world tour. The still sultry super-star launched the tour with a private performance for the family of the Sultan of Brunei, reputedly the world's richest man. She continued on to South Africa, then began a circuit of European cities. Turner said European audiences seemed to enjoy her more and were more supportive of her work between hit records. "I am as big as Madonna in Europe, " she told Jet magazine. "I am as big, in some places, as the Rolling Stones."

Turner took her "Wildest Dreams" stage show to the U.S. in May 1997 for her first American appearances in four years. The tour kicked off in Houston, Texas, and went on 47 other cities before ending in July at New York's Radio City Music Hall. For two solid nonstop hours, the 57-year old but ageless rock diva gave a an electric performance that encompassed 20 songs as well as a continuous barrage of video and sound wizardry.

"Living My Wildest Dream

Turner made Europe her home from 1986. Her decision was influenced by her relationship with Erwin Bach, a German executive with EMI records, her European label. Turner and Bach met when he picked her up at the London
airport in 1986. They hit it off immediately, began dating steadily, and Turner ultimately moved to London to be with Bach. Although Bach was 16 years her junior and earned considerably less money, the relationship persisted through the 1990s. Because of Bach's own career, the two lived first in London, then in Germany, and finally to Zurich.

Meanwhile, from 1990, Turner spent six years overseeing the construction and decoration of her dream house in southern France. Decorated in an eclectic mix of neoclassical, art deco, and rock-and-roll mementos, the lavish villa was perched high in the hills overlooking Nice harbor, Cap Ferrat, and the Mediterranean beyond. There the grandmother born in rural Tennessee two put down roots between tours. She had reached the pinnacle of her profession, found love with a younger man, and enjoyed living in the present. I don't dwell on the past, she told Harper's Bazaar. "That's me—I don't go back."

Further Reading

Two interesting books on Tina Turner's life and career are I, Tina (1986), her autobiography with Kurt Loder, and Steven Ivory's Tina! (1985). Among the periodicals with additional information are Ebony (January 1992); Rolling Stone (October 15, 1992); a cover story in Vanity Fair (May 1993); TIME (June 21, 1993); and Jet (June 21, 1993). A short biography appears in Notable Black American Women (1992), edited by Jessie Carney Smith.

Turner, Tina

Tina Turner

‘“Tell me, who sounds like Tina Turner?’ asks the I lady herself. ‘Nobody. It’s a strange little gutsy kind of voice, isn’t it? I never liked how it sounded but I always felt good when I was singing. And I always kept doing it in spite of not liking how I looked or how I sounded; I knew it was all I had. When it’s all you have, whatever it is, you keep on opening doors with it.’” Tina Turner may be the only person on earth who does not like her distinct sound, a sound that engenders respect, admiration, and soul from an audience.

Tina Turner’s life, details of which have been published in her autobiography,/, Tina, began as Anna Mae Bullock in Nutbush, Tennessee. She spent her adolescence in St. Louis, where, in 1956, she first met Ike Turner, then performing with his band, The Kings of Rhythm, at the Club Manhattan. She sang with them as “Little Anna” and, when a male vocalist missed a recording session, filled in on Turner’s “Fool in Love” (Sue Records, 1960). The song was a hit and brought them from “race record” status to the Billboard rhythm and blues charts. Ike Turner redesigned the band and its live performances to feature Bullock, now named Tina Turner. The Ike and Tina Turner Revue, with heavy rhythm in music and dance routines, toured the country while a series of singles, such as “I Idolize You” and “Bold Soul Sister” for Sue and Blue Thumb, climbed the R&B charts.

The Ike and Tina Turner Revue achieved crossover success with the still-controversial single “River Deep, Mountain High.” The pop song—by Ellie Greenwich, Jeff Barry and Phil Spector, as produced by Spector—was a number one hit in England and gained the Revue an engagement as the opening act for the Rolling Stones on their European and American tours. “River Deep, Mountain High,” which Rolling Stone recently listed as number 30 in its top 100 singles of all time, was a flop in the United States, but the Rolling Stone tour brought the Turners to great prominence. At its peak in popularity, the Revue featured Ike Turner and the Kings of Rhythm in slicked-back hair, suits, and leather accessories while Tina Turner and her back-up singers, the Ikettes, wore microskirts, high boots, and wild wigs. Rolling Stone described it in 1984 as “everyone’s favorite gutbucket soul revue.”

The Revue defined itself in the song “Proud Mary,” originally a pleasant paean to life on a riverboat recorded by Creedence Clearwater Revival. In her intro, Tina Turner warned that “We never do nothin’ nice and easy … we’re gonna do it nice and rough.” In his “Onstage” column in the Village Voice in 1971, critic John Lahr described her act as creating “the illusion of mythic gestures: Tina’s presence is her power…. She knows she has energy and every performance is a

Awards: Winner of seven Grammy Awards, including 1971, (with Ike Turner) for best rhythm and blues vocal performance by a group, for “Proud Mary”; 1984, for record of the year and for best female pop vocal performance, for “What’s Love Got to Do with It?,” and for best female rock performance, for “Better Be Good To Me”; 1985, for best female rock performance, for “One of the Living”; 1986, for best female rock performance, for “Back Where You Started”; and 1988, for best female rock performance, for album Tina Live in Europe.

conquest which not only renews us but makes her stronger…. Whoever created her act knows how to make a myth and keep it gorgeously alive.” The Revue’s production values and insistent danceable beat brought the Turners to popularity in the United States, Europe, and Asia through their own tours, continuing Rolling Stones engagements, and the film “Gimme Shelter” which documented the groups’ 1969 tour. “Proud Mary” was awarded the Grammy for best R&B vocal in 1971, and they released three major albums for United Artists—Blues Roots (1972), Nutbush City Limits (1973), and The Gospel According to Ike and Tina (1974).

Ike and Tina Turner’s marriage and joint career broke up in 1976, and Tina Turner was forced to create a completely new act for herself. In her autobiography, she discussed the abuse that led her to the split which occured during a national tour. She had released two solo albums, Let Me Touch Your Mind (1972) and Tina Turns the Country On (1974) before the final breakup and developed a single act. United Artists released an unsuccessful solo album, Rough, in 1978. Turner then performed in Europe and with the Rolling Stones’ 1981 United States tour. Her single “Let’s Stay Together” with members of the English synth-pop band Heaven 17, reached the top five in Great Britain and led Capitol Records to produce a new album.

In 1984 she was still appearing in small clubs and at McDonald’s conventions when she returned to the top in England and the United States. Turner’s comeback was assured with the overwhelming popularity of her album Private Dancer (1984), which went double platinum within the year. It spawned hit singles for the title song, “Let’s Stay Together,”“Better Be Good,” and “What’s Love Got to Do with It,” which reached number one. In 1984 she won solo Grammys for best female pop vocal performance and for best female rock vocal performance, as well as taking record of the year honors.

Her vocal prowess was equalled by her performance power, which had even more impact on MTV and other cable music video shows as it had in live appearances. An HBO television special, also called “Private Dancer” was aired in 1985. She performed in Azzedine Alaia dresses that were couture versions of her Ikette miniskirts. The Turner legs became as well known and admired as the Turner voice. Her next recordings, “Been There and Back” and Break Every Rule, added to her fame. Turner has also appeared in film roles that augment her stage personality, among them, the Acid Queen in the rock opera Tommy (1975) and Aunty Entity, the leader of a post-millenium civilization in “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome” (1985).

Turner’s popularity in Europe and the United States has, if anything, grown, thanks to the universality of video and recordings. People magazine described the frenzy of a Munich audience during the Private Dancer tour: “Under 30-foot high scarlet red letters that spelled her name, Tina Turner came galloping across the stage, white-hot, humming with energy, those incredible legs pumping, pumping, pumping. From that first moment, they belonged to her, 12, 000 West Germans screaming with pure and mindless joy.”

Turner has claimed that her 1987-1988 world tour will be her last, at least in the foreseable future. She has discussed both a recording of ballads with Interview—“certain types of ballads… not real tearful, and not just with a piano, but with synthesizers and the electric sound”—and a return to “a raunchy rock album” with the New York Times. She plans to concentrate on filmmaking and stop live performance for the first time in more than thirty years.

Turner, Tina and Ike

Ike and Tina Turner

Combining gospel inspired vocals with rough, raunchy, and seductively sexy rhythm and blues (R&B), Ike and Tina Turner burst on to the musical scene in the early 1960s. At first, their sex-soaked soulful music captivated a mainly African American dominated audience. Slowly, however, mainstream white America began to warm to them, most notably through their R&B hits that successfully crossed over to the pop charts. Covering songs like Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Proud Mary,”—their only American top ten pop hit— didn’t exactly hurt their careers, either. Despite the rather tepid reception they received in their American homeland, Ike and Tina Turner were revered in Europe, counting among their many admirers the Rolling Stones.

During the 1950s, Ike Turner was fronting an R&B band called the Kings of Rhythm. The band had become the house band of the East St. Louis, Missouri based club called the Manhattan. During their tenure as the house band of the club, they had achieved the reputation of one of the better rhythm and blues bands in the area. At the same time, 17-year-old Anna Mae Bullock began accompanying her sister to the Manhattan. She became entranced with Turner and his band, and would regularly attend the club to see the Rhythm Kings. Bullock repeatedly asked Turner if she could sing with the band, but to no avail. One day, the band’s drummer offered the microphone to Bullock’s sister who declined to opportunity to get up and sing with the band. Leaping at the chance she had been waiting for, Bullock leapt on stage and belted one out with the band. Turner was amazed with what he heard and told her that she could sing with the band as one of their vocalists. Not too long after this, Turner and Bullock began to date.

Bullock and Turner married in 1958. Soon after, Turner then re-christened his new bride calling her Tina after Sheena, the so-called queen of the jungle. When a session singer, who was to record Turner’s song “A Fool in Love” was unable to show up, Tina took over the vocal duties, and the song became the first single by Ike and Tina Turner. The single, which was released on the Sue label in 1960, climbed to number two on the American R&B chart, and peaked at number 27 on the pop chart. The Rhythm Kings now became members of the newly formed Ike and Tina Turner Revue. The Revue also featured the Ikettes, who were Tina’s backing singers and dancers. The Ikettes and Tina infused the Revue with a seductive sexuality as they strutted across the stage in short skirts and high heels.

Their next single “I Idolize You” made the R&B top five while languishing in the lower reaches of the pop chart, in December of 1960. Ikeand Tina Turner’snextsingle, “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine,” an R&B number two hit,

Group formed in St. Louis, MO, 1956; signed to Sue Records and released “A Fool in Love,” 1960; released “I Idolize You,” 1960, released “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine,” 1961; released The Soul of Ike and Tina Turner, 1961; released Don’t Piay; Me Cheap, 1962; released It’s Gonna Work Out Fine, 1962; signed with Warner Brothers and released Live! The Ike and Tina Turner Show, 1965; signed with Phillies and released “River Deep, Mountain High,” 1966; signed to Pompeii and released Ike and Tina Turner Show Vol. II, 1967; released So Fine, 1968; signed to A&M and released River Deep, Mountain High, 1969; signed to Blue Thumb and released Outta Season, 1969; released The Hunter, 1969; signed to Minit and released In Person, 1969; released Come Together, 1970; released Workin’ Together, 1970; released Live from Carnegie Hall/What You Hear is What You Get, 1971; released ‘Nuff Said, 1971, released Feel Good, 1972; released Nutbush City Limits, 1974.

Awards: Gold certification for “Proud Mary,” 1971; gold certification for Live from Carnegie Hall AWhat You Hear is What You Get, 1972; inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, 1991.

crashed the pop top20 and landed at number 14, in the autumn of 1961. A few months later their debut album, The Soul of Ike and Tina Turner, was released. In 1962, the Ike and Tina Turner Revue released two more albums on Sue, It’s Gonna Work Out Fine and Don’t Play Me Cheap. Although a consistently popular act on the R&B circuit, in America, the Ike and Tina Turner Revue did not manage to parlay its tremendous success on to the predominantly white pop market in America. They signed with Warner Brothers, in 1965, and released Live! The Ike and Tina Turner Show.

The dawn of 1966 marked a turning point in the fame and fortune of Ike and Tina Turner. Recalcitrant record producer Phil Spector, who offered to produce a single for Tina, provided that Ike had no input on the song, contacted them. Ike was reluctant at first but then changed his mind when Spector offered to put both his and Tina’s names on the record. Spector paid him $20,000 for Tina’s services. The resultant single “River Deep, Mountain High,” was, in effect, Tina’s first solo recording, despite the fact that Ike was also named on the record. Released in 1966, the single failed to ignite the American singles chart and languished at number 88. On the Fans of Tina website, Tina was quoted as saying that the reason “River Deep, Mountain High, had not done so well in America was that “it was too black for the pop radio stations and too pop for the black stations.”

All of her hard work was not for naught, though, as “River Deep, Mountain High” rocketed up the British singles chart and landed at number three. All of a sudden, the Ike and Tina Turner Revue was the next big thing in Europe, where they were treated as major celebrities. In America, however, they were still relegated to playing solely the R&B circuit. In October of 1966, the album River Deep, Mountain High cracked the British top thirty. The Ike and Tina Turner Revue were then asked to open for the Rolling Stones on their 1966 tour of England. They continued to tour and released The Ike and Tina Turner Show Vol.//in the spring of 1967. Their next record, So Fine, was released on Pompeii, in 1968.

Signing to a two-album contract with Blue Thumb Records, Ike and Tina Turner released Outta Season and The Hunter, in 1969. They also signed a long-term contract with Minit and released the live In Person in 1969. Three years after it was released in England, River Deep, Mountain Highwas released in America by A&M. It peaked at number 102. Another supporting slot with the Rolling Stones, this time in America, brought the busy year of 1969 to a close for Ike and Tina Turner.

Come Tbgeffterfeaturing a cover of the Beatles’ song of the same name, and a cover of the Sly and the Family Stone song “I Wantto Take You Higher” was released in 1970. The following year, Ike and Tina Turner finally made it big, in terms of success, on the American pop chart as their R&B based cover of the Creedence Clearwater Revival song “Proud Mary” cracked the top five. The album it was culled from, Workin’ Together, made it to number 25 on the American album chart, as did their live double album Live from Carnegie Hall/What You Hear is What You Get, both of which were released in 1971. In late 1971, ’Nuff Saidwas released, butfailed to gain the success of its predecessors.

Throughout most of their career and marriage, Ike abused Tina, both physically and emotionally. After a bloody fight on July 2, 1976, Tina decided that she had had enough and walked out on her husband. She left with a gas card and less than 40 cents to her name. In October of 1976, their professional partnership was officially dissolved. Two years later, their divorce became final. Ike and Tina Turner were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1991.

TINA TURNER

Alegendary performer who overcame many hardships on her way to the top, Tina Turner has been singing rhythm and blues professionally since the 1950s. Admirers credit her longevity to personal courage, unbounded energy, and, most of all, great talent. Turner's voice is famous for its distinctive husky quality. Her basic vocal approach has changed little over the years: Often she begins a song using the deep, gravelly end of her voice, then slowly increases volume before breaking forth with a high-pitched scream. Her high-voltage style reflects the turbulence that has often characterized her life.

From "A Fool in Love" to Stardom

As a child growing up in rural Nutbush, Tennessee, Annie Mae Bullock picked cotton and dreamed of becoming a nurse. Her plans changed, however, when rhythm and blues singer Ike Turner discovered her at age eighteen, married her, and changed her name to Tina Turner. As Ike and Tina Turner, the couple led one of the most energetic, dynamic acts in rhythm and blues. Their success lasted from the 1960s well into the 1970s with hits such as "A Fool in Love" (1960) and "Proud Mary" (1971). Famous for her wild antics onstage, Turner would dance, writhe, scream, and engage in blatantly sexual dialogue with her husband. Although they cultivated the image of a happy couple, behind the scenes it was a different story. Turner later alleged that Ike took drugs and beat her repeatedly during these years, telling television journalist Mike Wallace in 1996, "I have had, basically, my face bashed in." Finally leaving Ike in 1976, Turner converted to Buddhism and began focusing on a solo career. At first she struggled in low-paying lounges and clubs, but the hard work paid off in 1984 when her Private Dancer album became a multimillion seller on the basis of catchy hits such as "What's Love Got to Do with It" and "Let's Stay Together." At age forty-five, Turner had finally achieved mega-stardom, crossing over to the pop market through recordings that emphasized rock and roll glamour over R&B grit. Along with her music she updated her image, popularizing fishnet stockings and blonde fright wigs with a look many female entertainers copied. In 1986 she published her autobiography, I, Tina: My Life Story, which deals candidly with her years of abuse and the Buddhist chanting practices that changed her life.

Pop Survivor

By the beginning of the 1990s Turner was famous worldwide, with the financial freedom to perform and record when she chose. She settled into a luxurious home in the south of France with her partner, German record executive Erwin Bach, and found a level of personal happiness that had eluded her during her years with Ike. In 1993 I, Tina was made into a film titled What's Love Got to Do with It, starring actress Angela Bassett. For the film's soundtrack, Turner recorded new versions of songs that had distinguished her career, including the autobiographical "Nutbush City Limits" and "Proud Mary." The album is a showcase for Turner's range and versatility, presenting a compendium of rhythm and blues music styles from the 1960s to the 1990s. On "Rock Me Baby," she growls and shouts, displaying her skills as a tough blues singer. "Darlin' You Know I Love You" is a raucous number in which Turner recreates the swaggering type of R&B popular in the 1950s and early 1960s, while "Disco Inferno" recalls the dance music of the 1970s. On the album's contemporary hit, "I Don't Wanna Fight," Turner sings from deep personal experience, giving listeners an indication of just how far she has come: "Hanging on to the past / It only stands in our way. . . . It's time for letting go."

In the late 1990s Turner continued to perform exhausting, kinetic live shows that would have been a physical challenge for performers half her age. Reviewing a 2000 performance, the Toronto Sun enthused, "Half of the time at a Turner concert is spent just marveling at her still gorgeous physical state—her legs, her body, her face, her energy, her presence, her vocal power." In 2000 Turner released Twenty Four Seven, an album enlisting the services of contemporary producers Mark Taylor and Brian Rawling, both of whom oversaw the production of fellow diva Cher's multimillion-selling Believe album in 1998. Twenty Four Seven features the same electronic production sound as Believe, but is distinguished by Turner's undiminished vocal range and prowess. She sounds tough and unsparing on "Absolutely Nothing's Changed," a powerful tale of survival. "I'm bruised but I ain't broken," she sings matter-of-factly, using her rough-hewn voice to deliver a testament to personal strength and conviction. The title track has a driving rock feel that recalls some of her best work from the 1980s, according to many critics. While the smooth production on the album keeps the music at the same emotional level, Turner transcends it through her dynamism and professionalism. Whether whispering hoarsely or shouting at the top of her range, she never misplaces a note or loses control of pitch. In September 2000, Turner announced plans to retire from live performing. "This time, I know it's a closure," she told Mike Wallace, "I can feel it." Reflecting on her past adversity and present contentment, she observed, "It's almost like the war is over. It's all finished."

Turner began performing during an era when old-fashioned showmanship and vocal talent were prized attributes for rhythm and blues performers. During the decades that followed she never lost those qualities, continuing to infuse her work with spirit and zest some forty years after entering the business. In the process she set a standard of endurance that continues to inspire younger artists.

Tina Turner

Tina Turner exploded into the rhythm & blues charts as a lead singer in 1960. Forty years later, as a solo artist, she had proved herself a die-hard singer of rock and roll. By 2000, her credits included 27 top ten songs and more than 180 million records sold worldwide. She once played to a crowd of 180,000 people in Brazil and was the subject of the intense biographical film, What’s Love Got to Do with It in 1993. Twenty years after the release of her 1960s recording of “River Deep, Mountain High,” with the Ike & Tina Turner Review, the song appeared among the top 20 recordings in Rolling Stone’s top 100 hits of all-time. Youthful, ageless, and a wellspring of energy, even as the diva turned 60 years old, she continued to entertain eager audiences, leaving her legions of fans to marvel at the music that never seemed to stop.

Turner was born Anna Mae Bullock on November 26, 1938. She grew up in Nutbush, Tennessee, not far from Brownsville, where she lived with her sharecropping family in a two-room shack. Her musical talent emerged when she was still a youngster, but it was during her teen years in St. Louis in the mid-1950s that she made her historic liaison with a band leader, named Ike Turner, whom she married in 1960. The collaboration between the couple began at the Manhattan Club in East St. Louis, Kansas. Initially Tina Turner performed under the stage name of “Little Anna,” until the band’s first hit single, “A Fool in Love,” scurried up the Rhythm & Blues charts in 1960, with Tina Turner as lead singer. The success of that record led Ike Turner to reinvent his band to spotlight Tina Turner. Thereafter the group performed as the Ike & Tina Turner Review. They embarked on a national tour, and a succession of recordings followed, including several hit singles. During the 1960s, the Turners worked as an opening act for the Rolling Stones and released a crossover hit, called “River Deep, Mountain High,” that moved them into the forefront of popular music.

Tina Turner’s Lei Me Touch Your Mind, released in 1972, during the Ike & Tina Turner Review days, was her first solo album. In 1973 she released a second album, called The Country of Tina Turner. The Turners’ performances, enhanced with high-energy backup singers, called the Ikettes, brought them to the forefront of rock and roll between 1958 and 1978. “Proud Mary,” the Turners’ frenzied arrangement of a popular classic, became a trademark theme, with music erupting from a slow and soothing introduction into an unbridled melee of rhythm. “Proud Mary” peaked at number four on the record charts, and in 1971, the duo won a Grammy Award from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences for “Best R&B Vocal” for their interpretation of the rhythmic, pile-driving ballad.

Born Anna Mae Bullock on November 26, 1938, in Nutbush, TN; married Ike Turner (divorced 1976); children: one son with Turner, one son from a previous relationship (Craig and Ron), and two stepsons (Ike Jr. and Michael).

One fact that remained hidden to the public throughout the Turners’ years of stardom, was the presence of severe domestic violence that plagued the Turner marriage. Tina Turner, who suffered intense physical and emotional abuse at the hands of her husband, reached her limit in June of 1976. She took a severe beating, shortly after the couple’s arrival in Dallas for their first stop on a national performance tour, and in desperation at the situation she abandoned Ike Turner without warning and even though the two were committed to a major tour. She left with less than 50 cents in her pocket and spared no time to collect her baggage.

One month later, on July 27, 1976, Tina Turner filed for divorce, and emerged with a small fortune in settlement property. The money paid off lawsuits from canceled Ike & Tina Turner Review engagements, leaving Turner virtually penniless. She slumped into poverty, but only very briefly. Without a backward glance she turned her life around, and embarked on a full-blown solo career.

In 1977, she moved to London, England and spent the remainder of that decade living and working in Europe. Undaunted by the poor showing of her 1978 solo album, Rough, from United Artists, Turner hired manager Roger Davies in 1979. She returned to the United States in 1981, toured with the Rolling Stones, and renewed her efforts to revitalize her career as a solo artist. She met with success in 1984 when her album, Private Dancer, sported three top ten singles, including, “What’s Love Got to Do with It.” The song became her first number one hit record, and she won three Grammys that year, including best female pop vocalist, best female rock vocalist, and record of the year. She veered onto a stable course as a comeback sensation, and in 1985 she scored with a number two hit, “We Don’t Need Another Hero,” from the movie Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. Additionally, her recording of “One of the Living” won the Grammy award for best rock vocal performance by a female.

Yet as she conquered the issues of her tempestuous marriage to Ike Turner, she quickly tired of explaining to the press and to the public about the years that she spent under his domineering spell. In an attempt to bring closure to the affair, she immersed herself in documenting the painful details of her ex-marriage in an autobiography,/, Tina. The book, a Morrow publication, appeared in 1986. That same year her Break Every Rule album went multi-platinum (more than one million sold), and she added a Grammy to her collection, for “Back Where You Started.” In 1987, Turner took to the road for 18 months for a world tour of 25 countries that lasted into 1988. She performed 220 concerts during that promotion, including a phenomenal program in Brazil where she appeared before an audience of 182,000, among the largest concert audiences ever assembled anywhere. Turner’s concert tours sold out repeatedly, her recordings registered brisk sales, and her Capitol Records release, Tina Live in Europe, won a Grammy for best rock vocal performance by a female.

Turner’s image by then had solidified to legendary proportions, as she “oozed sexuality from every pore in…her gritty and growling performances …,” according to John Bush in All Music Guide. She took some time to rest after the well-received tour and in 1989 returned to Europe where she bought a home in London at Notting Hill Gate and settled there. Her 1989 release, called Foreign Affair, largely self-produced, was her first album after a year’s hiatus.

From time to time, Turner performed in selected motion pictures, although acting was never the focus of her career. In 1975, she appeared as the Acid Queen in the film version of the rock opera, Tommy, by The Who, and in 1985 she portrayed the character of Auntie Entity in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. Overall, Turner rejected the majority of roles that became available to her because they failed to appeal to her sense of reality; while too many roles were characterized as sexy, Turner’s preference was to appear in roles of women who emote strength.

In 1993, a British video appeared, called Tina Turner: The Girl from Nutbush, a documentary including rare footage from the early years of the Ike and Tina Turner years. The low-visibility project was upstaged, however, when film director Brian Gibson transformed Turner’s 1976 autobiography into a feature film. Kate Lanier wrote the screenplay for the movie, which starred Angela Bassett and Laurence Fishburne, and Turner generously lent creative consultation to the project. In related interviews when the movie opened in theaters, Turner expressed her desire to let go of the memories portrayed in the film; Ike Turner meanwhile avoided endorsement of the final product.

In 1996, the indefatigable Turner released an album, called Wildest Dreams, featuring Bono, Sheryl Crow, Sting, and Antonio Banderas among others. Turner, nearing 60 years old by then, seemed a human dynamo. On her tenth solo album, Twenty Four Seven, released by Virgin Records in January of 2000, she collaborated with several younger artists. It was her first album since 1997, and critics applauded the effort. Los Angeles Times said of Turner that she, “successfully meshes retro-soul with techno flava … [and] is still up to any challenge.” In conjunction with the release of her album in 2000, she performed in the pre-game show of Super Bowl XXXIV, and she embarked on an international tour, beginning in South Africa and encompassing 49 cities with a grand finale at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. Turner, a bona fide rock and roll icon, displayed no sense of slowing down. When she announced her plans to retire from touring following her millenium tour in 2000, New York Times’ Jon Pareles noted that, “Ms. Turner is not about to become a grande dame anytime soon, reflecting from a distance on past triumphs and heartbreak. The way she sings, she’s still a fierce contender in the battle of the sexes.”Washington Post said of the 61-year-old Turner, “She’s got better legs than Mick Jagger and better teeth than Eric Clapton.”

It is at times a surprise to Turner’s fans that her on-stage gyrations and shouting-match singing style are exclusively a performance illusion. Personally, she is slight and calm, not raunchy at all like her stage and musical image. Writers Hedda Maye and Robyn Foyster in fact called her, “The epitome of classic chic with a classic sense of style”… in Ebony. After moving to London in 1977 following her breakup with Ike Turner, she moved on to Cologne, Germany, and then Zurich, Switzerland, where she owned a luxury home with five floors, a penthouse, and a pool. By 2000, Turner had settled cozily into a custom mansion in the south of France. The dream home, which she purchased in the late 1990s, is called Anna Fleur and is located in Ville, France, overlooking Nice and the Riviera. Turner decorated all of her own homes, in part with her collection of rare statuary and with a medley of musical instruments that she collected, including several antiques.

She is the mother of two sons, Craig and Ron. Additionally, she is a grandmother and a great-grandmother. Although she never remarried, in 1986 she developed an intimate and lasting relationship with a European recording executive. Shortly before she left her husband, she became a devout student of Buddhism and retained that religion throughout the years.

Tina Turner 1939–

“We never do anything nice and easy,” intones Tina Turner in the spoken introduction to her famed rendition of the rock classic “Proud Mary,” recorded with her then-husband Ike. “We always do it nice...and rough.” Tina’s life as a hard-working soul singer was often rough and anything but nice; she endured endless touring and—according to her own allegations and those of many others—abuse and exploitation from Ike Turner, who discovered her. She sang with his revue for years and racked up hits like “Proud Mary” and “Nutbush City Limits” before finally leaving him in the mid-1970s, casting about and starting virtually from scratch before returning to prominence in 1984 with a number one hit.

Since then, Turner has remained in the public eye, becoming, in the words of Vanity Fair s Maureen Orth, “the queen mother of rock ’n’ roll.” A 1992 film version of her life story—based on her 1986 autobiography—was a surprise hit, and even when well into her fifties, she continued drawing large crowds to her concerts. As much as her gritty, rafter-shaking voice, Turner’s strength in the face of adversity has made her a legend. “I was a victim; I don’t dwell on it,” she told Orth, adding, “I stood up for my life.”

“Tina” was an invention of Ike’s; the singer was born Anna Mae Bullock in rural Tennessee in 1939. Her father, Floyd Richard Bullock, was a farm overseer and church deacon who fought perpetually with his “black Indian” wife, Zelma. According to the singer’s recollection in her autobiography J, Tina, the family grew its own food, buying only “flour and sugar from the country store in Nutbush.” The town, in and around which she spent her childhood, was tiny and sparsely populated. At various points, young Anna and her sister were raised by their grandmothers, since their parents moved about, changed jobs, quarreled, and finally split up. Zelma ran off to St. Louis when Anna was eleven, and Floyd stayed only a year longer. Anna found herself in the care of other relatives and cousins over the years. She began working for a friendly white family, the Hendersons, in nearby Ripley, and remembered years later fashioning her dreams of a stable home on their lives.

Career: Sang with like Turner’s Kings of Rhythm and the Ike and Tina Turner Revue, 1956-76; solo performer 1976-. Hit recordings include “A Fool in Love,”“Proud Mary,”“Nutbush City Limits” and “What’s Love Got to Do With it” Solo albums include Private Dancer, 1984; Break Every Rule, 1986; What’s Love Cot to Do With It (soundtrack), 1996; Wildest Dreams, 1996; Twenty-Four-Seven, 2000. Appeared in films Tommy, 1975, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, 1985; What’s Love Got to Do With It, 1993, Participated in relief concert Live Aid, 1984, and charity recording “We Are the World,” 1985. Author of autobiography I, Tina, 1986.

Selected awards Grammy Awards for best rhythm and blues vocal performance by a group (with Ike Turner) for “Proud Mary,” 1971; best female pop vocal performance and record of the year for “What’s Love Got to Do With It,” 1984; and best female rock performance for “Better Be Good to Me,” 1984, “One of the Living,” 1985, “Back Where You Started,” 1986, and Tina Live in Europe, 1988. American Music Awards for best female vocalist and best video performer, 1984; inducted (with Ike Turner) into Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame, 1991; Essence award, 1993.

Anna became a cheerleader in high school. Never satisfied with her own looks, she declared—according to a quote in I, Tina from her girlhood friend Carolyn Bond—“If it’s the last thing I do, I’m gonna have long hair and some big hips and big legs.” Years later, as Tina Turner, her hair and legs would be her defining features.

In the 1950s, she moved to St. Louis to be with her mother, and it was there that she met the man—and heard the music—that would dominate her future. Ike Turner’s Kings of Rhythm were local stars, enthralling club audiences with their energetic R&B in the early ’50s, the germinating years of rock and roll; their 1951 single “Rocket 88” was a number one R&B hit and has been called the first rock and roll record. Ike, the bandleader and guitarist, had an evil reputation and myriad girlfriends. Anna, who had always loved singing hymns in church, used to sing along from the audience; “I wanted to get up there so bad,” she remembered in her autobiography.

Anna’s sister Alline was dating Ike’s drummer Gene Washington, who heard Anna sing and eventually arranged to suspend a microphone off the stage so the audience could hear her. He compared her voice to that of blues legend Bessie Smith, noting, “A woman doing that type of thing then was kind of a no-no”; in other words earthy and sexy in a way that was guaranteed to thrill Ike’s audience.

Although it took her a considerable length of time to get Ike’s attention (since she was too thin to arouse his otherwise voracious carnal appetite), she did finally get him to hear her. Belting out the B.B. King tune “You Know I Love You” when Ike played it on the organ during an intermission, she made a distinct impression, as she recollected to co-author Kurt Loder: “Boy, Ike—that blew him away. He went ‘Giirrrlll!’ And he stopped playing the organ and he ran down off that stage and he picked me right up! He said, ‘I didn’t know you could really sing. What else do you know?’” Soon she was performing regularly with the band but concealing her new activity from her mother, who predictably forbade it when she found out. Ike, however, made a special visit to Zelma and turned on his considerable charm, winning her approval and securing Anna a regular gig. Singing gutsy R&B cover tunes with Ike and the band made her “feel like a star.”

Life on the R&B club scene—the so-called “chitlin circuit”— was hardly safe, Ike’s assurances to Zelma notwithstanding. Soon Anna became pregnant by Ike’s saxophone player and bore her first son, Raymond Craig, in 1958. She took a job in a hospital to supplement her musical income, which was soon raised from $15 to $25 a week. She then moved into Ike’s house, though she compared their initial relationship to that of siblings. Later, however, he began “moving in” on her life and would eventually exercise almost complete control over her.

In the meantime, however, she sang on Ike’s single “Box Top.” It wasn’t until the single “A Fool in Love,” however, that she would see chart success; the record scored on the R&B and pop charts, after being released under the name “Ike and Tina Turner.” The name “Tina” appealed to Ike because it rhymed with “Sheena,” the jungle queen from a 1940s movie serial; it became Anna Mae’s new moniker. The surname accompanied a quickie marriage in Tijuana, Mexico, in 1962. “I was now Mrs. Ike Turner,” Tina remarked of the event. “Or whatever.” The group, over the objections of some of its members, became the Ike and Tina Turner Revue.

Tina, as she was now known, was soon pregnant by Ike. Though she felt gratitude and loyalty toward her mentor and husband—who was technically a bigamist, since he had married another woman previously and didn’t obtain a divorce for many years—she acknowledged in her memoir that he “kept control of me with fear.” He worked her relentlessly, forcing her to tour even when she was hospitalized with jaundice, and beat her when he perceived (or suspected) insolence. Meanwhile, he carried on with various “Ikettes”—Tina’s backup singer/dancers—and many other women. The Revue, however, was hot, riding the success of “A Fool in Love” to prestige gigs at New York’s Apollo Theater, venues in Las Vegas, and a spot on television’s American Bandstand. The group had a string of R&B hits, some of which also made the pop charts.

Ike renewed his record contract and bought a large house in Los Angeles; his and Tina’s children were brought there from St. Louis. The Revue kept touring under increasingly stressful conditions, even as Ike’s shrewd business sense earned him ever larger sums. The Ikettes left, partly in response to his treatment of Tina. Later, Ike and Tina signed up with Loma Records, a Warner Bros. R&B subsidiary headed by Bob Krasnow. The Revue appeared in a pop festival that was later released as a concert film, The Big TNT Show. They also toured with English rock sensations the Rolling Stones, instantly winning favor with the British band, who worshiped the gritty, soulful sound of black American music and were electrified by Tina’s performance.

Krasnow received a call from legendary pop producer Phil Spector, who wanted Tina to sing on a record— without Ike. The normally autocratic husband agreed to the arrangement thanks to a generous financial offer, although Spector stipulated that Ike stay out of the studio. He then went to work on a lavish production of the song “River Deep, Mountain High,” a barnstorming soul number that took his patented “wall of sound” approach to new heights. At his request, Tina refrained from the high-pitched wailing and “chitlin circuit” theatrics Ike had always demanded, in favor of a controlled delivery that stuck closer to the written melody. Released late in 1966 with a tremendous advance hype, the song flopped in the U.S.—perhaps due to botched promotion—but was a hit in the United Kingdom. It has, in retrospect, reached the status of a classic.

England, Tina explained, was “the beginning of my escape from Ike Turner”—an escape that wouldn’t be realized physically for more than a decade. But the country’s rock musicians tended to adore Tina, and this adoration somewhat cushioned the impact of Ike’s blows, which rained down upon her resilient flesh with ever greater frequency and fury as he descended into “blow” himself: cocaine. The Revue and Ike’s virtual harem began to appear to Tina as, in her words, a “sadistic little cult”; eventually she tried to run away from him, but he tracked her down. Tina even attempted suicide by taking fifty Valium tablets; though the hospital pumped her stomach, she didn’t revive until Ike spoke to her, seemingly brushing aside death in his all-encompassing claim on the woman he’d discovered, managed, married, and monopolized.

Ike and Tina scored another big hit with Otis Redding’s “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” in 1969, but Tina was by this time less interested in R&B than in rock. And it would be rock songs, for the most part written by young white artists, that would provide her biggest hits. In 1970 the Revue scored with their versions of the Beatles’“Come Together” and “I Want to Take You Higher” by funk-rocker Sly Stone; the following year saw their greatest hit, a jumping rock-and-soul rendition of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Proud Mary.” It sold over a million copies. The Revue again toured with the Rolling Stones. They failed to score any more huge hits until “Nutbush City Limits,” penned by Tina, stormed up the U.S. and U.K. charts in 1973.

Tina had been introduced to Buddhism by a friend, and her chanting helped her survive Ike’s increasing abuse and cocaine dependency. In 1975 she starred in her first film, portraying the Acid Queen in Ken Russell’s production of the Who’s rock opera Tommy. Tina was befriended by co-star Ann-Margret, a longtime fan, and appeared on the star’s London television special. She also released a solo collection of country songs, but it didn’t fare well commercially. Ike and Tina had their last hit together in 1975, “Baby—Get it On,” and that
year saw the release of Tommy, which garnered Tina rave reviews. Eventually, she vowed to leave Ike— buoyed by predictions of psychics that she would become a big star without him—and fought back against a beating while the band was on tour in Texas in 1976. She then fled with only thirty-six cents and a gas station credit card to her name. Ike pursued her but seemed to realize she was determined to stay away from him. He continued to harass her, however, from a distance, and his threats led her to surrender almost every claim for monetary recompense during their divorce proceedings. “My life’s more important,” she declared, leaving Ike with the lion’s share of their community holdings and shouldering the debt for the shows canceled after she left him.

Tina worked cleaning friends’ houses and even living on food stamps while she began putting her life together. Nonetheless, she savored her freedom. Caring for their children for a while, she eventually sent them off: “I had been their mother, I had been his wife. Now it was time to be me.” Her 1978 album Rough sank, but she supported herself with cabaret-like shows in Las Vegas and at similar venues. Even so, she remained massively in debt for the canceled performances from the last Ike and Tina tour. Through Ann-Margret she hooked up with Australian manager Roger Davies, who had relocated to the States. He, in turn, revamped her showbiz act, replacing the tuxedoed dancers and elaborate costumes for a stripped-down rock band. She toured Europe in 1980-81, and Davies finally helped her stage the beginning of her U.S. comeback with a well-publicized performance at New York’s The Ritz, where Tina Turner brought down the house. A number of celebrities turned up, including members of the Rolling Stones.

Shortly thereafter, Tina joined Rod Stewart in a rendition of his “Hot Legs” on television’s Saturday Night Live; the Stones then invited her to tour with them. Her new-wave version of the Temptations’ classic “Ball of Confusion,” recorded in England with the synthesizer duo Ware and Marsh, appeared on a collection with other star readings and charted well there but wasn’t released in America.

Davies, meanwhile, managed to get Tina a deal with Capitol Records, but only for the European market. Her next single with Ware and Marsh, a remake of soul legend Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together,” was a smash hit in the U.K., and only when imports and dance clubs established its potential in the U.S. did Capitol agree to release it stateside. The company then insisted that Turner cancel her scheduled tour and record an album. Davies insisted that it be recorded in England in tandem with the tour. While she performed, he gathered material for her, and the result, 1984’s Private Dancer, would return her to the top in her own country. With hits like “What’s Love Got to Do With It,”“Better Be Good to Me” and the title song by Dire Straits leader Mark Knopfler, the album shot to number one. Soon she graced the cover of Roiling Stone magazine, took home two American Music Awards, and won two Grammys. In Loder’s words, “After a quarter of a century, Tina Turner was an overnight sensation.”

After appearing at the gigantic 1984 Live Aid benefit concert, Turner acted in George Miller’s 1985 film Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, scoring another hit with the song “We Don’t Need Another Hero” from the film’s soundtrack. In 1986 she published J, Tina, which wasn’t a blockbuster, but told her fans the intimate details of her personal struggles. She sang on the all-star charity recording “We Are the World,” won a Grammy for her performance in the “Prince’s Trust All-Star Rock Concert” and scored a number of hit singles and albums in the ensuing years. In 1991 she and Ike were inducted into the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame.

The year 1993 saw the release of the Touchstone Pictures film version of Tina’s life, What’s Love Got to Do With It, starring Angela Bassett as Tina and Laurence Fishburne as Ike. It was a smash; Tina re-recorded several hits for the soundtrack and even appeared at the film’s end as herself. In the wake of the film’s success, she went on tour again. Variety remarked in a review of a 1993 concert that “watching Tina Turner perform is like watching a tornado traverse the landscape as it builds in power and intensity.” The Los Angeles Times called her show “more effective as a sweeping piece of theater than as a concert,” but admired her “energy and heart.” She had reached the pinnacle of her profession, and found love with a younger man, German record executive Erwin Bach. She publicly refused Ike’s request to open for her on tour, declaring, in a Time interview,